WoW – More fun together!

Guild VS Raid

This week, I’ve read several posts about people’s guild organization, management, and member ranks. Vidyala wrote about it; so did Saga, Alas, Zelmaru. There were others too I just don’t have them all at my fingertips.

Reading all this made me realize Reversion and I got luckier than we thought when we moved to Winterhoof to join Crits and Giggles. We already knew it was full of friendly people, some of whom were bloggers, with raiding opportunities anda culture we’d like. What I didn’t realize was how apparently rare it is to find a setup where raid != guild.

There are currently two raids in Crits; our Fri/Sat and a Sun/Mon, both ten man raids. As more people gear up there will probably be a third raid. We’re not likely to develop a 25 man, tens are our strength.

There are several guild officers in Crits. I mostly know because of who I have to ask for invites for new alts. Officers work hard behind the scenes to set stuff up – but so can any member that wants to. Reversion and I have not been hampered by our normal-member status; in fact it probably helped to create the raid we wanted, where every raider has an equal voice – but Reversion and I are the benevolent dictators because we do the organizing.

There are two ranks of “normal” member in the guild, one for all members who have authenticators, with guild bank access and repair funds, and one for non-authenticator-members without. That’s it. There’s no “elite” raiders or “unimportant” socials. No “trial period” for the guild. No need to remove people because their gearing up is slower.

Admittedly, we are not a Serious Raiding Guild. We are not trying for server first, or server tenth. Reversion’s and my raid has yet to down our first boss (Tol Barad guy does not count) while the other raid just killed their first Sunday (I got to step in for that). On the other hand, at 7pm Friday all my raiders are online, in vent, at the instance, ready to go. They listen and do what we ask and we have fun.

I want us to get some more bosses down so we can demonstrate that you CAN be a social guild with raiding success. That you can choose raiders based on their personality fitting with everyone else and demonstrated potential to not be bad, rather than their uber gear. But what I like best is knowing that if someone doesn’t fit in our raid, that they may still fit the guild. When the two are not the same thing, there are options like that. We have a guildie who is a notorious PVP’er, the sort of guy who is server-infamous; we’re not a pvp guild and he does his own thing but for whatever reason he likes us. We’ve added a couple members in the last week from a similar level of raiding guild (ie, not very, but wants to raid) because we’re a nicer environment and don’t kick people because they’d rather be a shaman than a priest. We have people with ten alts in the guild, people with none.

I can’t even put into words how proud I am of the guild. It’s amazing. I am so lucky to have found people that work well in our group and take initiative to organize things on their own.

The foundation of the guild has always been that raiders are not greater than normal members. We used to have ranks that would indicate who wanted to raid and who didn’t. We really cleaned up the ranks going from something like 10 ranks to 6? The only trial period is for the newest of members, but it’s not long before it’s either you have an authenticator or you don’t.

Sure it might be a bit “socialist” but it works out. Crits and Giggles is for the people. There’s a reason we have a good reputation on the guild as being one of the largest social friendly guilds on our server.

The idea that people transfer to Winterhoof just to play with us still floors me. We’re obviously doing something right, and as long as we keep practicing little tolerance for riff raff, we’ll continue to carry that reputation.

It’s…. I still don’t know much about the server outside the guild but that’s ok, it’s big enough. And I *do* know that there are people in other guilds who know us and love us, every time we have a guest they rave about our raid and Vent atmosphere. I’m so glad we have the atmosphere where we can relax and have fun. Where I can have vent on even with Nomster sitting right there. Nobody’s perfect and we have our…. less refined types… but as a whole, it’s just such a wholesome environment.